ABACA

WHAT IS ABACA?

Abaca is a web application that makes benchmarking the progress of a startup easy.

Abaca provides entrepreneurs with a common language to use with investors, mentors and their team as they seek capital and resources. It also matches entrepreneurs with investors and other resources based on an algorithm and a self-assessment test.

Abaca helps entrepreneurs get funding and grow their startup by assessing their company's maturity, strengths, and weaknesses through the lens of an investor. We’ve refined each category in our self-assessment tool with insights from hundreds of investors and thousands of entrepreneurs.

MY ROLE

Prior to my joining, Abaca’s product team used data Village Capital collected from entrepreneurs and investors over its 10 years of running accelerator programs and investing in early-stage startups across the world.

In order to take Abaca to the next level, I was brought on to update the current user experience and inform the product roadmap based on feedback from our users.

Within six months of joining, I built an in-house UX practice, aligned the research cycle with design sprints, incorporated user insights into the product roadmap, and planned upcoming releases with product and development.

GET INVOLVED

Want to help test Abaca?

Abaca continues to conduct usability and a/b tests, as well as interviews for generative research projects.

Interested in testing out the product?
Abaca is looking for entrepreneurs and investors to participate in interviews and usability tests!

Contact Andrew Hobbs if you’d like to learn more about projects or to test the product.

*Due to COVID-19, all research and testing is conducted remotely.

PAST PROJECTS

Work samples made available upon request.

• Customer Journey Mapping for coalition investor

• End-to-end experience design of Milestone Planner

• User flows of onboarding process for three user types

• User personas for two investor types

• A/B testing of two prototypes adding filter & search features

• Usability testing of new pricing page design

• Information architecture of productboard components and tags

Usability Test: Understanding how investors search and connect

As investors joined the Abaca platform, they expressed an interest in connecting with other investors using Abaca.

How this research will be used:

To determine future prioritization of product features and releases for Q2 of 2020.

My role:

UXR/UXD: Create research plan, draft sketches and wireframes, create prototypes, lead recruitment, conduct usability tests, and present results to PM throughout the process.

Key research objective:

Understand how investors currently use Abaca to discover and connect with potential co-investors.

Sketches and paper prototype:

Our first set of user goals were to test an investor’s ability to

1) filter for relevant co-investors,
2) learn more about the relevant co-investor, and
3) connect with the relevant co-investor.

We used the below paper prototype in the first usability tests:

Insights from paper prototype:

• Pros:
  - Good amount of information in the expanded view of the profile

  - Ability to link directly to the investor’s Crunchbase profile

• Deltas:
  - Unclear if looking at entrepreneur or investor profiles

  - Didn’t understand purpose of a filter if there is a matching algorithm
  - Need more information on how we are calculating the matching algorithm

High-fidelity Prototype:

Based on the feedback we received from the paper prototype, we made the following design changes:

• Removed the left filter search panel

• Added right “Improve Your Matches” panel - includes questions which feed into and improve the matching algorithm

• Changed the matching algorithm percentage boxes in the top right of each individual profile - Blue = investor profile and pink = entrepreneur profile

We decided to test a high-fidelity prototype rather than a low or mid-fidelity version because our users (investors) are more familiar with high-fidelity prototypes.

• User goals were the same as the paper prototype

• Here’s the high-fidelity prototype

Feedback from high-fidelity prototype:

Overall, while investors were able to search for and find a relevant profile in the usability test we learned that our product wasn’t solving our users’ problem.

We learned that…

• Investors are not actively looking to connect with other investors, and

• Most investors meet co-investors after closing an investment.

“Why would I use Abaca? I usually meet the other investors once the term-sheets are signed.”

“No, I don’t actively look for new investors. I’m usually a degree of separation from anyone I want to know.”

“I’m brand new to cleantech, I guess it would be helpful to learn about other investors already in the space.”

Pivot and Next Steps:

Based on what we heard from the usability tests, we realized we need to better understand the investor perspective. We recommended to the PM to postpone adding investor-specific features in Q2. These features were a “nice-to-have” and not urgent, so the PM agreed it was better to understand our users before building features for them in Q2.

We are pivoting from conducting more usability tests to conducting interviews.

• New research objective:

  • Understand investors’ motivations and challenges in discovering, connecting with, and building relationships with potential co-investors.

• Key research questions:

  • Do investors want to grow their investor network and why?

  • How would investors like to find and connect with other investors?

  • What does an ideal co-investor relationship look like?

• Email me if you’d like to learn more about the status of this project.